the mismatch between our parties and our governing institutions is problem number one. problem number two which is the toughest thing for us to say and for many people to hear is that in the parties are not equally implicated in this. we have something called asymmetric polarization in which the republican party has in recent years become almost a radical insurgency quite prepared to repeal a hundred years' worth of public policy. so we don't know how to cope with the situation when both of our parties are not operating in the pain -- in the mainstream, and the book is written to help people understand why this has happened and what we can do about it. >> now, wasn't there a time, though, that the democrats were the party that was asymmetrically out of balance with the rest of the nationsome. >> oh, yeah. that's been true many times in history, most recently in the late 1960s, you know, over vietnam and other issues. but you could go back to the 1890s which was the last period of dramatic polarization like this when the democrats were off the rails on the left. you know